Barton County democrat. [volume] (Great Bend, Kan.) 1885-1915, 1887-03-10

upon them. One man tnlnkS boxing
will keep him strong; another. rowing;
third, walking SO many miles every
day without any object; a fourth. going
to bed at a particular hour every night;
a fifth, oatmeal every morning; sixth,
bathing every day, and SO forth.
Physical exercise is, no doubt, one OF
the greatest preservatives of life and
health, but when overdone it has killed
thousands of strong men by heart
disease, consumption, apoplexy or par
alysis. Mr.. Gladstone has recruited his
strength for many years by telling trees
and his diet is very simple. Il little fish,
some bread and cheese and half pint
| of bitter ale often serving him for
dinner at his club after a hard days
work. Other brain workers, like Arch
bishop Whately, have had enormous
appetites and been equal to three ordi-
nary men at dinner table. Pure air
and pure water have a great deal to do
with longevity, so much so that in the
lake districts of Westmoreland, Eng
land, the average age of those who
| died during recent very severe winter
was above eighty-five years.
Some sanitarians are always saying
"take rest; let your mind lie fallow;
| don't work so much," and seem to
think that brain work especially is a
constant drain upon ones vital capital.
Others. believe more truly, look upon
| idleness as the real ''thief of time" and
point to the great workers who have
lived to a grand old age. Mathema-
| ticians claim that even the absorbing
mental process of working out diff
cult problems is conducive to Ion
| gevity. Leibnitz, they tell us, lived
his seventy years; Euler his seventy
six; Lagrange his seventy-seven; La
place his seventy-eight years; while
Sir Isaac Newton died at eighty-five,
Plato at eighty-two, Archimedes at
seventy-five, and the somewhat myth
cal Pythagoras at ninety. Some of
these ancients, however. were not en-
inent mathematicians, but may be
classed as general philosophers, natu-
raj or metaphysical. Poets do not al
ways die before their time, as Keats
and Byron and Arthur Hugh Clough
did. On the contrary, the much
abused Tennyson, will survive I proph
| Coy iii lIlC lClIlOlC NIiIlClSlIo Oll Iio
conservatism, which have been made
about his last poem, and perhaps most
severely by the ex-Prime Minister Glad
stone, who conferred the Earldom upon
him. But taking the poets of all times
and countries L find that Pindar lived
to 80, Sophocles to 80, Euripides Go rs,
Simonides to 80, Michael Angelo, who
was not only poet, but painter, sculptor
and architect, to 80, Godfrey Chaucer,
'the father of English poetry" to II,
William Wordsworth to 80 and Walter
Savage Lander to SO. How man of
Landor's furious temper could live SO
long is q miracle.
| No life, one would think, could be
more exhaustive than that of judge
who has to sit for hours together, day
| after day, in crowded court room;
vet many of the Lord Chancellors and
Chief Justices of England, as well as
Chief Justices of our own country, have
lived far beyond the three score years
and ten.
Sleep is as great medicine and sup
port of the nervous system-and life,
being interpreted, means the nervous
! system, neither more nor less-as food,
probably much more so if we may
| Judge by some animals that subsist for
all The winter months on sleep
alone. Yet many strong persons who
/ do not know what it is to lie awake all
night die prematurely, while 1 have
myself met in Brooklyn some persons
who could not get an hours rest in a
week who have gone on living with
wonderful tenacity.
Dear old Mrs. Delaney used some
times to eat nothing for days, lie awake
all nights for weeks together, cry her
old eyes out with the half memories of
the days gone by, and yet she exceeded
a century of life by nearly a year. 1t
is a remarkable fact that in every Eu-
ropean country statisticians of unques-
tionable character for veracity have
sometimes denied point blank that any
man or woman has attained or exceed
ed the age of 100 years. The greatest
of these longevity skeptics was Sir
George Cornwall Lewis, who died
some twenty years ago. He was. if 1
remember, Chancellor of the EXchequer
for two or three terms under Lord Pal
merston. At Christ Church, Oxford, he
was Double First and was regarded at
the Union Debating Society as the most
reliable authority for facts. A Chan
cellor of the Exchequer is the last man
in the world, one would suppose, to
travel outside the narrow boundaries
of statistics, and his eXactness of mind
as statesman, made his skepticism
about old age the more remarkable.
| Il he ~ ha of L.
would probably have told that eulogist
of longevity that there had never been
any thing of the kind on this planet